Heart's Shadow (19/30) Ed. 8 of 30

Heart’s Shadow is a highly personalised work inspired by artist's life experience. Heart’s Shadow evokes a sense of survival in isolated place and the over-powering of a foreign landscape. Many of us have had the experience of leaving our home behind but inherently home is where the heart is.

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Ying Huang is a Manchurian-born Chinese Australian painter and printmaker. Known for her unique style of screenprinting that is directly etched onto raw steel metal, Huang’s work has been exhibited throughout Australia and in Hong Kong and Scotland. She has won awards from Print Council of Australia, the Victorian Flanagan Art Prize (Ballarat) and RMIT University Best Student Prize. In 2016, she was commissioned by Melbourne’s City of Yarra to create a six-walled mural representing its multicultural community.

In 2020 Ying rescued an ex-racing greyhound who she named “Kiddy” (after a cat she once owned). The physical and emotional rehabilitation of Kiddy has had profound impact on both of them. Since being rescued, Kiddy has been a focus of many of Ying’s paintings.
Ying’s illustration style tells the story of how, over time, Kiddy transformed from a flea-bitten mistreated dog into a sweet, loving, plant-chewing, toy destroying and sleeping 20-hours a day creature - a creature who also loves finding and chasing birds in her backyard.

Huang conceptualises a political art movement that she has termed Polipanda or Political Pop Propaganda Art. Polipanda is a hybrid practice combining political propaganda art and pop art, explores how history is manipulated through mass media images and challenges us to rethink notions of authenticity and originality.
Her work continues to satirise popular culture and political history. This work finds inspiration from Rose O’Neill’s Kewpie Doll, a character who is “a sort of little round fairy [and] whose…idea is to teach people to be merry and kind at the same time.” Huang inverts its optimism through its uncanny mischief by appropriating the ‘pie’ of kewpie. This series, which she terms as ‘Political-pie’, includes producing caricatures of notorious and influential political leaders such as Donald Trump (‘Trump-pie’), Kim Jong-Il (‘Kim-pie’) and Malcolm Turnbull (‘Malcolm-pie’). Huang’s work is playful, rebellious, humorous, yet provides unflinching and unapologetic commentary on the world of mass media images in which we live. She takes viewers on a light-hearted tour of the art world, prompting us to re-encounter our taken-for-granted experiences of ‘art’, everyday life, and popular culture.